Marlins SP, Dodgers OF not the only ones with award-worthy stats

Every Friday, Sporting News’ Ryan Fagan takes a deeper look at the players making on-the-field headlines—both good and bad—with the help of advanced baseball metrics. Unless otherwise specified, statistics have been gathered from baseball-reference.com and fangraphs.com, two thoroughly indispensable websites.

This week, we’ll look at the ridiculously good crop of National League newbies. (Note: All stats through Thursday)

Those members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America holding a vote for the NL Rookie of the Year award have a difficult task. The worry isn’t so much about whom to pick first—Miami Marlins starter Jose Fernandez likely locked up the award with his insane second-half performance (1.32 ERA in 10 starts, with only 38 hits allowed and 84 strikeouts in 68 innings). And casting a first-place vote for LA Dodgers sensation Yasiel Puig (.332 average, 17 homers, 11 stolen bases, .948 OPS) wouldn’t be wrong, either.

The dilemma comes at the end of the ballot. Who will be left off? Unlike the MVP award, where ballots are 10 players deep, or the Cy Young Award, where ballots are five pitchers deep, there are only there spots on the Rookie of the Year ballot. Rookies who would have been serious contenders—or even won the award—in other years might not even receive a single vote this season.

The stat: FIP

What FIP isn’t: Flying into Poughkeepsie

What FIP is: Fielding Independent Pitching. This stat looks at the absolutes controlled by a pitcher and not his fielders—strikeouts, home runs, walks and hit batsmen—as explained in this handy Fangraphs video. The stat xFIP (Expected FIP) uses MLB-average home run-to-fly ball rates instead of the pitcher’s actual HR/FB rate and is considered a better predictor, but since the Rookie of the Year award is about what a pitcher has actually done, FIP is a better tool for this discussion. The average FIP in baseball over the past five years has ranged from 3.94 to 4.32.

What this means: Starting pitching is the real strength of this year’s NL rookie crop. All 10 rookie starters listed above have posted a better FIP than Verlander did in his rookie season, when he received 26 of the 28 first-place votes, and Hellickson did in his, when he took home 17 of the 28 first-place votes. Several excellent rookies will be shut out of the voting, and Braves left-hander Alex Wood, who has an excellent 2.69 FIP, isn’t even in the conversation because he only has pitched 75 innings. As a point of reference, Tampa Bay’s Chris Archer leads the AL rookie starters with a 4.01 FIP.

NL rookie relievers have been solid as well this year. Trevor Rosenthal of the Cardinals (2.04), Brandon Kintzler of the Brewers (2.67) and Paco Rodriguez of the Dodgers (2.91) have turned in excellent seasons. Of the six relievers to win the Rookie of the Year award in the wild-card era, three of them—Neftali Feliz (2.96), Scott Williamson (3.37) and Kazuhiro Sasaki (4.30)—had an FIP that exceeded those three.

The stat: WAR

What WAR isn’t: Good for absolutely everything

What WAR is: Wins Above Replacement. Though not infallible, WAR is generally recognized as the best overall measure of a player’s individual contributions—offense, defense and baserunning—as it determines how much better a player is than his league-average replacement would be. A player with a full-season WAR above 2.0 is considered a solid starter; a WAR above 4.0 is generally considered All-Star level; anything in the 8-to-10 range is considered MVP-worthy. Note: Fangraphs and Baseball Reference calculate WAR in slightly different ways, which leads to slightly different results. For this piece, we’re going with Fangraphs’ version.

What this means: Look at the stars on this list—Jeter, Posey, Pedroia, Braun, Howard. By WAR, Puig has had a better season than all of them, and he didn’t make his debut until June. And, as we mentioned earlier, he’s probably not even going to win the award this season. He’s easily the best hitter of this year’s class—though Gyorko (19 homers) has pop—but the strength of this group is its fielding ability. Among players with at least 700 innings in center field, Pollock (18.2) and Lagares (17.6) rank second and third, respectively, in the majors in Ultimate Zone Rating. And at third base, Arenado trails only hot corner magician Manny Machado in UZR.

Again, a lot of very, very good players will be shut out of the Rookie of the Year vote this season. Maybe it’s time for the BBWAA to consider at least five ballot spots.